The Burnside Blog

Posted By Mike Thelin on 01/13/2008

As we promised on page 28 of our spiffy new zine (You have bought one by now, haven’t you?), here are renderings of a few key projects from our Urban Uprising story. These, dear Portlander, are things to look forward to.

ZGF Architects, Portland’s largest firm designed this tower (SW 12th Avenue and Washington Street), in part, for itself. The 500-strong staff will fill the middle floors with luxury apartments on top. At one time, it was to be about 10 stories taller, until the hotel considering membership in the mix dropped out. But I still believe it looks rather smashing with its charcoal glazing and recessed balconies. Who knows? Maybe some of ZGF partners will live on top and work below (Imagine Bob Frasca and Greg Baldwin at work in their jammies). But everybody gets to be next door to Cacao, that fantastic PDX chocolate dealer.

Okay, listen up! Take your average residential lot in Portland (That’d be 5,000 square feet), build a house that fills the space from corner-to-corner, stack it on top of itself 22 times, add some nice details, and you’ll have something that resembles this tower (West Burnside at 13th Avenue) being developed and designed by Skylab. Proposed for a site just behind the Crystal Ballroom, it’s skinny, it’s sexy – and in this market, very speculative – but I hope to God it gets built.

North of Lovejoy, the Pearl is getting taller. So in that spirit, here’s another 19-story tower (NW 11th Avenue and Overton Street) brought to you by the good folks at Boora and Hoyt Street Properties. In a much more “classical” vein than that duo’s recent sleek, Modernist Metropolitan, it could become our “Dakota” on the Pearl’s Central Park, The Fields.

After years of interfamily squabbles, the Naito family has teamed with the entrepreneurial-minded Brad Malsin and is finally ready to develop its many properties in Old Town. Here’s the master plan rendering. If all goes as planned, we predict that Old Town in five years will be the hottest hood in Portland, if not the Northwest.

Boora Architects and Developer Jim Winkler put this office tower (Naito Parkway at Marshall Street) on-hold in 2001. According to recent press, it’s off-hold and set to activate and prettify Naito Parkway with its green features and nearly 300,000 square feet of office space. If Winkler can find tenants, One Waterfront Place could break ground by summer.

PSU razed the eyesore (not so) Advanced Center for Advanced Technology, and will replace it with this: a state-of-the-art student recreation center. It will also house classroom space and six retails spaces. After the School of Business took a pass, the rest of the space will be filled, oddly enough, with City Archives. Paper-pushing aerobics, anyone?

Last but not least, Ziba’s smashing world headquarters, (NW 9th Avenue and Marshall Street) helping to define the North Pearl, and maybe redefining Portland.